Mrs. Engels (34 page)

XXXVII. Nothing Is Final

Dr. Allen, the physician of all misery, tells me again that I must learn to rest and mend myself, else my complaints will worsen and, if I'm not careful, carry me off at any moment.

“What did the doctor say?” says Frederick.

“The usual,” I says.

He smiles. “The man knows nothing. What you need is the fresh air that comes from a good walk.” He stands and pulls me up after him. “Come on.”

We leave as we are, half-bare: he without his jacket and I without anything to cover my head. There's a breeze, but not cold; it runs through my hair like a soothing hand. We cross the road and stand at the bottom of the Hill, looking up. The sheep have been shorn and there's lambs. The strollers are few, it being a weekday.

“What do you think?”

“I've never been to the top. Imagine, Frederick. Near two years, and I've never thought to climb it.”

“Well, no time like the present,
mein Liebling.
”

We go up the path. The spring flowers are out, dancing.

“The weather's picking up,” Frederick says. “The new season is coming on.”

“Aye,” I says, “it's fine now,” though I still insist on the fires and the hot brick in my bed.

After only a few steps, my chest was already hurting; now that we reach the top, I've no breath to spare. We sit on the bench, and little by little my faculties return.

Up at such a height you can see all of London, the big pile of it. It's a sight to make you think of God and the things carried out on His responsibility and the places built on His behalf. Frederick takes in a deep breath and moves his gaze across the entire length of it. “The British don't know how to build a city.”

“Or tear one down.”

He laughs. “The Romans, like the Greeks before them, believed that membership of an actual physical city was a condition of true civilization. English public life, by contrast, needs no town. Its elements already exist in every man's household.”

Happy here, we sit another while.

I ask him about work.

“It's good, I suppose.” He thinks Karl ought resign from the Council and return to his theoretical work. The second volume of the Book must be finished soon, or it'll never be.

“And what about your history of Ireland?” I says. “Are you going to get back to that?”

He sighs. “I will. As soon as order has been established in the Association.”

Which can only mean never. A woman knows order is only a thought with no reality to support it.

My bladder begins to strain; we make our way back down before it fails me. While waiting to cross, we both fall to looking at the house.

“Do you ever miss Manchester?” I says.

“Sometimes,” he says. “Not really.”

“And Mary? Do you miss her?”

He looks off for a moment. And now back, his eyes bright with a smile that can only mean, “You can't miss what never left you.”

Back inside, I go straight upstairs to my bedpan. A minute and there's a knock on my door.

His boots are already off and he has the ties of his shirt loosened.

“Turn around,” he says.

He undresses me all the way.

“Now lie down.”

I do as he commands, not under the sheets, but on top of them. I open my legs so he can get the full regard. It's the hope that I—
me, this body here
—might be his happiness that makes me fearless.

He feeds his bit out the front hole of his trousers and climbs onto me. I make no attempt to control my feelings, which come out of me now through my mouth. He, on the other side, stays silent, as ever. Silent except for his eyes.

“Say something,” I says. “Anything at all. Please, just say it out.”

“Shh,” he says.

I can feel her in the air around him, pushing him on, and in this moment I don't care for myself; I will disappear into her, if it'll make him mine.

“Say her name.”

“Lizzie, be quiet.”

What is it? What's stopping him? Doesn't he know that I'm willing to nothing myself, to think of my body as if it was another's, if it means he'll look no further than me?

“It's all right, Frederick, I know what you're thinking.”

Releasing a loud groan, he clasps a hand over my mouth. “Shh! Don't say another word!”

At first I feel crushed, and cry inward to myself, for I know he once delighted in hearing her speak: from their first meeting to their last, it was “Let us hear, Mary,” and “Don't stop, Mary,” and “Whatever you say, Mary.” But the hurt soon vanishes, because I understand now, as he rushes towards his discharge, that my words—whatever they are and whenever they are spoken—are unsafe to him, for they have the power to reopen sad subjects.

He shivers free of his wants, and falls onto me, panting. I bring my hands to rest on the wet back of his shirt. As he heaves, his gut presses down into mine, making it hard for me to catch my own breath, but I let him be and don't move to topple him, for I notice, too, that I have all the air I need, that I am full in the awareness that no body was ever nearer to him than I am now.

Moaning to show his fulfilment, he lifts his weight up and puts it onto his elbows, though still I feel our hearts bound tight in a mutual feeling. He kisses my nose and my mouth. Smoothes back my hair. Smiles.

“How is it,” he says, “that I always feel as if you are trying to find me out, when in truth I have nothing to conceal?”

I shake my head, embarrassed, for sudden
I
am the one who has been caught with her thoughts bare.

“Nay, Frederick, you mustn't feel that.”

He caresses my burning cheek and searches me through, and he must see—he can't fail to behold it—that, at bottom, I love him no less in knowing he has cared for others and might any moment cease to find interest in me; indeed, I love him all the more as a result.

He winks and I wink back, and we grin at each other for a long time. Now—his desires restored perhaps—he brings his mouth to my ear and nibbles on the soft part where another woman might keep a jewel. And he says it. He does.

“Oh, Lizzie,” he says. “Lizzie,
mein Liebling.
My love.”

Praise the end of it. The expert has come and pronounced me incurable, so at last—long last—I can rest without hope. For it's the hope, at the end, that causes you to suffer. It's with hope that you lie with no spirit in you, racked by a mind's fever that sets you to beat your breast and pull your hair and speak wild and dangerous prayers; and it's the hope that, in the next moment, kills the quick of your life and sinks you into a waste from which you don't rise unless they lift you out to do your dirty business. But with hope destroyed, you see life for what it is, and you welcome death, for you know now that it's equal, and there's always joy in anticipation, joy and gladness that you're not one of them; not Spiv, who must care for my evacuations; not Pumps, who must soak my feet and feed me broth with a spoon; not Frederick, who must make the beds at night and light the kitchen stove in the morning. It's them you pity. With things still to work for.

Dr. Allen comes and goes, and the boy who brings the medicines. They fill me with such an amount of morphia that the slow return of the pain is all that tells me I'm still alive. The famous swelling in my bladder: I know once it no longer gives off its heat, I'm gone.

And I'm not afraid. What comes afterwards can't be worse than Eastbourne. Or New Brighton. Or Bridlington Quay or Great Yarmouth or Worthing or the Isle of Wight or Baden or any of the other potholes I've been dragged to for the cure. Every soaking, every wrapping, every gulp just another stride towards God taken, if only it could be admitted and spoken on.

One day, in Karlsbad, a man with a head like death skinned over says to me, he says, “What are you here for?”

What am I here for?
I need to take a moment to think. And then: “What else but for the emptiness of life they provide?”

By the way he looks at me, I can tell he thinks there's something wrong in my head.
That,
he thinks, is why I'm here.

Pumps comes to raise my legs. And put the cushion under me. And turn me to the other side. She's returned from the finishing school in Heidelberg more wild than she went, and I can tell from the roughness of her handling that she's resentful of the work. Worse, her time away has given her airs. She refuses to sleep in the same room as Spiv, who's now forced to roll out her mat on the kitchen floor, and in the evening she eats with Frederick in the dining room, the two of them alone. I sometimes hear their useless patter coming up through the ceiling, the scrape of their knives on the good plate.

I watch her now, the whiteness and plumpness of her arms and neck; the rotten health of her. It'll be her turn one day to have this agony, to be wiped and sponged into a mortified shiver. Till then, there's no point expecting her to know.

“Pumps,” I says.

“What is it? Are you in need of something?”

“Moss will have to be told.”

She rolls her eyes. “Don't worry about that now. Go to sleep.”

“Newgate jail. You'll have to go.”

“Head down now, Aunt Liz, and get some rest.”

“He'll wonder if I don't come. He'll wonder.”

I start up in the night. Except it's not the night but the day with the curtains drawn. Tussy is here.

“Sweet child,” I says.

She rubs the cold out of my hands, and tells me the time, and the place, and who is here with her.

“I'm alone,” she says.

And she always is. Never brings the man Lissagaray with her, though I know she's always at his side; the shadow that comes between her and the family; the black shade on the freshest years of her life. Happy is the child that's never taught concealment.

“Your mother? Your father?”

“In heaven.”

“Heaven?”

“I said Malvern, Aunt Lizzie. The spa at Malvern.”

Malvern. The place we go when we pass over, alone and friendless, with only secrets to fill our purses.

Everything is memory. I close my eyes, and the moth I've just seen beating itself against the lamp appears in my mind as a picture, and I can't see what separates it from the others that present themselves to me: the scenes from my early life, the comings and goings of long ago, the things that haven't happened. Old and young and never to be, they are all the same, no difference between them, just pictures that come between us.

The release is forgetting.

I tell Pumps to send for Nim. More and more, when I'm alone, the picture of Freddy pays me hidden visits. He comes and takes up the empty spaces in my mind, the caught moments, and I must have his news. How is he keeping? Is he coping since Sarah ran away with everything?

But when she comes, she's too small, speaks too soft, and I've fallen too far in a waste to listen.

I hear my name, and I see you, Mary. Offering me something. Or is your hand out, asking? Do I owe you? Have you something old to count against me?

There's a pause in my breath, and for a long moment I think it mightn't come back. But now it does. A frothing. A babby's gurgle. A sound dreadful enough to bring Pumps down from her room.

She turns me on my side and slaps it out. “Better?”

Better.

The world doesn't happen how you think it will. The secret is to soften to it, and to take its blows. But a person doesn't understand this till all chance of acting is past. How can we know when we're young and busy hardening ourselves against the winds, and dreaming of a time when things won't require us to be hard at all; how can we know that, in fact, we're living our only life?

I open my eyes to see Lydia, crying. I close again and let her have it out.

Awake, and she's still here, on a chair that's been moved near me. It's late. The lamps are lit. The fire crackles and spits.

“You came up all this way?”

“Of course we did, Lizzie.”

Jamie is sat beside her, his cap wrung out in his hands.

“You're very good to come.”

“Don't, Lizzie. Save your forces.”

I sit in my wet and watch them. They turn their gaze to their laps.

A minute and Frederick comes in, breathless. Spiv and Pumps come after him. And a man, a church man. Lydia and Jamie shuffle over to make room. Frederick kneels at the bedside and takes my hand. The church man comes to stand behind him.

Is it that time already?

“Mrs. Burns, I'm Reverend Galloway from St. Mark's Church in Regent's Park.”

I moan at him in the tone of “And I'm Lizzie Burns, a Catholic.”

“Lizzie, the Reverend Galloway is here to marry us. We're to be wed!”

The girls whimper. Lydia lets out a sob. I can't part my lips, they're so parched. Pumps has to spoon me a bit of water before I can speak.

“Would it count?”

“Of course. We have a special license.”

“An English blessing?”

“Does it matter?”

“Only if it's a dishonest thing.”

He comes off his knees to hover over me, his face so close it's only a blur. “No, Lizzie. Don't think that. It is my desire too.”

I nod my assent, knowing that his actions come not from his own desires but from a wish to give me something; a gift that will please my God and ensure me a good death. The man opens his book, speaks out his Protestant words; short and not unfamiliar; beautiful. When called upon to kiss me, Frederick goes for my forehead, his whiskers like a scour on my skin. Spiv comes forward with a bit of paper, a pen, and an inkwell. Frederick flattens the paper onto the mattress. Now he dips the pen and presses it in my hand. Closes his own hands around my own to keep me steady. Brings the tip to touch the page. Everyone waits. There's a quiet that'd burst your ears. A mark on this page and I, this poor woman here, will be his ever, Mrs. Engels.

“Frederick?”

“Yes, my precious love.”

“What will it be like?”

“What will what be like?”

“Communism.”

Water rises to his eyes and falls over onto his cheeks. “Now is not the time for that, Lizzie. Can you make your name? Can you do that? Do you need me to help you?”

You think if you ask enough questions you'll get to know what they're like, but you won't. You think there's something there, something to find. The truth is, there's naught but what you have in your mind about them. In front of us aren't our husbands but the stories we make of them, one story good till a better one comes to replace it, and it's only afterwards that this is understood; only after you've loved and hated them for what they never were; only after it has ceased to matter.